Analysis of the reduced wake effect for available wind power calculation during curtailment

Abstract

With the increase of installed wind power capacity, the contribution of wind power curtailment to power balancing becomes more relevant. Determining the available power during curtailment at the wind farm level is not trivial, as curtailment changes the wake effects in a wind farm. Current best practice to estimate the available power is to sum the available power calculated by every wind turbine. However, during curtailment the changed local wind conditions at the wind turbines lead to inaccurate results at the wind farm level. This paper presents an algorithm to determine the available power of a wind farm during curtailment. Moreover, results of curtailment experiments are discussed that were performed on nearshore wind farm Westermeerwind to validate the algorithm. For the case where a single turbine is being curtailed, it is shown that the algorithm reduces the estimation error for the first downstream turbine significantly. Further development of the algorithm is required for accurate estimation of the second turbine. All further downstream turbines did not experience a change in wake conditions.